Chapter 164: Revenge
ÉTIENNE
The blow struck me across the face, cutting off my words mid-sentence.
I reeled sideways, my shoulder slamming into the wall, and pressed my free hand to the throbbing spot on my cheek. When I pulled it away, my fingers were slick with blood—a real cut, deep and unexpected, carved along my cheekbone by something I never saw coming.
A heartbeat later, pain exploded, so sharp it blurred the edges of my vision.
"What the..." Laurent muttered, instinctively stepping in front of us.
The head healer rushed to my side, concern flooding his features and washing away the shock.
"Alpha Theo, hold still. Let me see..."
He never reached me.
An unseen force slammed into him.
No warning, no attacker in sight—just the sickening thud as his whole body was flung sideways by an impossible force.
His back hit the stone wall with a brutal crack.
The crack echoed down the corridor.
His head whipped against the masonry, then he collapsed to the floor, limp and motionless.
"Healer!" Margaux cried.
He did not move.
For one dreadful second, silence swallowed the corridor.
Laurent had his gun out immediately.
He scanned the corridor in both directions, eyes sharp and searching, but found nothing.
"Who is there?" he called out. It was not a question but a command, his voice cutting through the emptiness with the certainty of someone who had chosen to treat the threat as real, seen or not.
Nothing answered.
The next blow struck me square in the chest.
It punched the air from my lungs, dropping me to one knee, then flat to the floor. I lay stunned, lungs refusing to remember how to work.
"Étienne." Margaux’s voice cut through, sharp and close. I heard her footsteps shift sideways, not toward me, which meant she was tracking something I could not see.
I pushed myself up to see her face.
She followed something invisible across the corridor, her gaze locked with the intensity of someone tracking a real, tangible presence.
"Is it Séverine’s familiar?" I said, getting one knee under me.
"No." Her eyes stayed fixed on the invisible point. "It is... It is... Prim."
A chill shot through my veins.
I was on my feet before the meaning sank in, and Margaux moved with me, stepping between me and whatever she saw, hands raised in warning.
"Prim, wait—"
The force that hit her was not subtle.
It hurled her sideways into the corridor wall, the impact echoing before she even hit the ground. She slid down slowly, one hand splayed against the stone.
Every instinct in me lunged toward her.
Something unseen seized my collar, lifting me off the floor before slamming me down so hard my teeth rattled. I lay with my cheek pressed to the cold stone, watching the corridor lights flicker as the warmth vanished from the air with unnatural speed.
Laurent fired.
The shot rang through the corridor and hit nothing I could see.
And then I saw it.
For a split second, something pale flickered in and out of sight like a broken light—something wrong, nothing like the person it once was. It was too elongated, too unnaturally still, the kind of stillness that belonged only to things that had stopped breathing. It carried the unmistakable wrongness of something that had crossed over and returned with only the worst of what death had given it.
Laurent saw it at the same moment.
He fired again. The bullet passed straight through, and the thing turned its attention to him.
I recognized its intent in the way it moved, even before it acted.
I was already running.
The window at the corridor’s end was old, its casement wide. Laurent stood just two feet from it when the apparition struck, hurling him backward through the glass and out into the open air.
My hand closed around his arm.
I had made it in time by a margin I did not want to calculate, and I braced against the window frame with everything I had while Laurent hung against the outside of the estate wall, the ground a killing distance below him, his other hand scrabbling for purchase against the stone.
"I have you," I said through my teeth. "Do not move."
I then pulled.
The apparition appeared behind me.
I felt its cold presence before the pressure built at my back—the telltale chill that always came before it tried to touch the world. I knew what was coming, but both hands were locked on Laurent’s arm and letting go was not an option.
"No!"
Margaux’s voice was directly behind the apparition.
I twisted my head enough to see her, standing between the ghost and me, her arms spread, her face carrying the expression of someone who had made a decision they were not entirely sure was going to work.
"He is not who you have a fight with," she said.
The temperature dropped further.
The corridor lights blinked out, flared back, then died again, strobing in a nightmare rhythm. The apparition flickered between being almost human and something that had abandoned that shape altogether.
The sound that came from it was no ordinary voice. It scraped the air, raw and unnatural, as if torn from a throat that had forgotten how to breathe or even speak.
"Revenge," it said. "Revenge... Revenge..."
Then its raspy, inhuman tone became even louder.
"The witch loves him. He has to die too. He is part of the reason I am dead. He has to die."
With one last heave, I hauled Laurent over the windowsill. He landed beside me, gasping for breath, his jacket shredded at the shoulder by the glass.
The apparition had not moved from where Margaux was holding it at bay.
But the cold had not lessened.
And the lights were still flickering.
And the voice kept coming, rising and falling, the same words cycling through it with the specific relentlessness of something that had been reduced to a single feeling and had no access to anything else.